Saturday, February 2, 2008

This presentation was given by Brad Wilson and James Newkirk, Microsoft. I sat in on Brad's Pair Programming Agile presentation at the first Seattle Code camp which I enjoyed alot. The first code camp had more Agile presentations. Apparently Agile is no longer the shinny new toy because there was only one presentation on saturday in that area. James has been with xUnit, since some part of it's JUnit days, through NUnit and now the new version of XUnit. He went through the history which explained some of the wierdness the process has had. He also went through a discussion of what they were concerned about when they decided to build a new TDD framework. It was nice to hear real world examples of bad logic or implementation. My favorite they mentioned was using the framework for code coverage. Code coverage is the process make making sure every line of code is executed. The idea being that the more executed code that goes through testing, the fewer bugs the release product will have. These two said that blank tests or non-functional nUnit tests were created in some environments they saw just to reach code coverage percentage requirements. The only place I have ever seen code coverage as a metric for quality was microsoft while working as a tester on OLEDB. They wrote issues on the board people wanted to cover and they covered all of them. Very impressive.

During the code samples and execution, it was obvious these two preferred TestDriven.Net over any other runner of the framework.

I had to feel for the guy that asked about UI testing. He obviously didn't know anything about TDD. In response, the discussion for UI testing covered watiN.